University Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor, Director of the Program in Comparative Literature

Contact

Biography

Elizabeth Richmond-Garza is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the Director of the Program in Comparative Literature and chief administrative and financial officer of the American Comparative Literature Association. She holds degrees from U. C. Berkeley, Oxford University and Columbia University and has held both Mellon and Fulbright Fellowships. Trained in Greek as well as modern aesthetics, she works actively in eight languages. Her research concentrates on Orientalism, the Gothic, Cleopatra, Oscar Wilde, and European drama. She is currently finishing a study of decadent culture at the end of the nineteenth century. Richmond-Garza is renowned for her creative, multi-media approach to teaching. Among other honors, she has been awarded the Chad Oliver Plan II Teaching Award, the 16th annual Friar Centennial Teaching Fellowship, and the Minnie Piper Stevens Teaching Award. She was elected to the Academy of Distinguished Teachers in 2004 and was awarded the Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award in 2009.

Interests

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century European drama; Renaissance drama; Oscar Wilde; the Gothic and Orientalism; decadence; aesthetic and literary theory; literature and the fine arts.

E 397N •
Cosmopoltnsm/Engagemnt/Divrsty

“Cosmopolitanism is about intelligence and curiosity as well as engagement,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006, p. 168).

When in the 5th century BCE Diogenes of Sinope, a freed Persian slave who had taught himself Greek and secured the respect of the city of Athens as a philosopher, was asked from what country he came, his reply was “I am a citizen of the world.” Who are we and for whom to we create? Globalization, transnationalism and diversity are not inventions of the 21st century. For more than 2,500 years, cultural and intellectual environments are invariably diverse, stretching across national, economic, ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual borders while also involving varying cultural, ideological, and personal contexts and goals. From widely different vantage points, President John F. Kennedy’s remark that “if we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity” is echoed by Hu Jintao, the former Secretary of the Communist Party of China, insistence that “diversity in the world is a basic characteristic of human society and also the key condition for a lively and dynamic world as we see today.” Diversity is a given in cultural and intellectual undertakings, and a thoughtful understanding of what diversity means and entails, is equally crucial. The research objects considered by today’s scholars are characterized by diversity, and our inquiries need to broadcast a commitment to being respectful, pragmatic and fair. The formation and enabling of scholarly communities and projects relies, however, upon an understanding of how human groups form, and how they experience division, rupture, and conflict. The cultural artifacts which emerge in these moments reflect and inform that experience. Abraham Maslow has suggested that “belongingness” is one of the eight basic things that define being human. This course will introduce students to the topic of diversity, drawing on methodologies and case studies from both the social sciences and the humanities. Students will be invited to investigate examples, both artistic and actual, which interrogate what it means to belong and how a rich understanding of society and culture necessarily informs our scholarship. The theoretical texts will be in common, and students will consider the ideas they raise in the context of their individual research agendas. Many of the instructor-provided case studies will be drawn from theatre and film, including: Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, David Henry Hwang’s M Butterfly, Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit, Anne Deveare Smith’s Fires in the Mirror, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, Dennis Gansel’s The Wave, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Thomas McCarhy’s The Visitor, and David Fincher’s Fight Club. Shared theoretical readings will include Konstantin Stanislavksy, George Hebert Mead, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Stanley Milgram, Judith Butler, José Muñoz, Benedict Anderson, Lisa Lowe, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari, William Labov, and others.

What is a “self,” an individual? Is it a single entity or is it always entangled with others? Is it something created by history, by politics, by art, by culture or by the divine? Or does it fashion itself? Does it change over time and across space? At some level, art is always concerned with making and unmaking the individual and with freeing or chaining this being. Tracking texts from Classical Greece, Iraq and India to medieval Europe and Japan, we will focus on the continuing, and sometimes desperate, attempts of ancient and early modern artists and authors both to phrase and to answer this question. Expected names from the western canon, like Euripides, Shakespeare, Goethe and Baudelaire will keep company with Japan’s Bashô, Russia’s Pushkin, Argentina’s Borges and Nigeria’s Achebe.

We shall not limit ourselves only to the western canon but will look at points of crisis where, whether because of gender, race, ideology or class, an individual’s voyage of discovery will demand answers and action. We shall trace a drama of self-actualization, more than two thousand years old, one that is still being enacted. From the extremities of the Greek stage to a lonely cry of agony in the Assyrian desert, from ideal Platonic love to its witty and non-dialectical Asian counterparts, from a Parisian’s insomnia in 1900 to the painful experience of post-colonial Africa, from compulsive gambling to uncanny hauntings, from the dark voyages of Romantic self-discovery to imagined journeys through magical lands, we shall explore the limits of this question’s answers.

While the basis of the course will be the literary texts, we shall pillage often and importantly the resources of the other arts of painting, sculpture and film especially to conjure back to life the spirits of these past identities in preparation for a spring in which we shall interrogate our own century as it emerges from the twilight of the twentieth-century experiment.

Texts: All selections will be from The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces (Expanded Edition in One Volume, 1997), and will include: Gilgamesh; Euripides, Medea; selections from Chuang Chou; Kalidasa, Sakuntala; selections from The Thousand and One Nights; Montaigne, “Of Cannibals;” Shakespeare, Hamlet; Basho, The Narrow Road to the Interior; Goethe, Faust; Baudelaire, from The Flowers of Evil; Pushkin, The Queen of Spades; Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths; Achebe, Things Fall Apart.

Requirements & Grading: The participation requirements include: Careful reading of all texts, consistent attendance and active discussion in class and in the discussion section. Attendance will be taken regularly at the start of each class. Each student will be allowed three unexcused absences in the course of the semester. Any further absences will lower the student's grade by a half grade (i.e. a B becomes a B-, and a B- becomes a C+).

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description:

“I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.” (Oscar Wilde)

London’s City Council finally suceeded in closing the theatres in 1642, but within twenty years they had reopened and were experiencing great success. Two hundred years of vital, outrageous, violent, political, and even exquisite drama fills the period in the history of the English stage between the familiar names William Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde.

As arrogant young men strutted across the London’s stages wittily abusing the less fortunate by virtue of class or gender and their victims captured the imagination of audiences, England moved quietly, and without bloody revolution through the 18th into the 19th century, experiencing the age of urbanization, industrialization, and imperialism. The plays of this important period, from the late Baroque, through Classicism and Romanticism, up to the edge of modernity, both represent and contest the tranformations of Britain from a powerful European monarchy into an international imperial and commercial power. The plays address this crisis of identity for Britain and for her active and increasingly diverse inhabitants, both at home and abroad, both male and female, both European and non-European. The plays range from the bawdiest and silliest of farces to the noblest exprssions of the passions of Romanticism, from somber meditations on race and gender in the late 19th century to diverting musical comedies. We will start with Behn’s feminist attacks on the womanizing and aristocratic Lord Willmore and trace the plays that follow her, from Farquhar’s satire of war and marriage to Gay’s London criminal underwold, from Lilo’s melodrama to Shelley’s soaring tragedy, from Shaw’s attacks on Victorian hypocrisy to Wilde’s symbolist vision. We will place these plays in the context of the tastes, ideologies, and crises of each period.

Much of the excitement of looking at theatrical texts derives from their performativity and multimediality. Extensive audiovisual resources from the period and from modern productions will be provided on-line and in class. They constitute part of the official course content. No previous familiarity with drama is expected or even solicited, and introductions to theatre and performance theory will be provided. The course should appealt to students interested in drama, performance, the politics of indentity, and the 18th and 19th centuries.

Texts: The plays we will read include: Behn, The Rover; Etherege, The Man of Mode; Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer; Gay, The Beggar’s Opera; Lillo, The London Merchant; Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer; Sheridan, The School for Scandal; Shelley, The Cenci; Planché, The Vampire; Boucicault, The Octoroon; Gilbert, The Mikado; Pinero, The Second Mrs. Tanqueray; Lewis, The Bells; Shaw, Arms and the Man; Wilde, An Ideal Husband and Salomé.

Requirements & Grading: The requirements for this course comprise: careful reading of all texts; consistent attendance, active discussion in class, and a brief oral report (10%); a book of “Director’s Notes” (collected in two halves, 5%+5%); a short essay (5 pages, 20%); a brief research report, formal prospectus, and analytical research essay (8-pages, 10%+ 5%+35%); a third assignment which maybe creative (3 pages, 10%).

In order to pass the course all assignments must be completed. Failure to complete any one of the assignments will constitute failing the course.

What is a “self,” an individual? Is it a single entity or is it always entangled with others? Is it something created by history, by politics, by art, by culture or by the divine? Or does it fashion itself? Does it change over time and across space? At some level, art is always concerned with making and unmaking the individual and with freeing or chaining this being. Tracking texts from Classical Greece, Iraq and India to medieval Europe and Japan, we will focus on the continuing, and sometimes desperate, attempts of ancient and early modern artists and authors both to phrase and to answer this question. Expected names from the western canon, like Euripides, Shakespeare, Goethe and Baudelaire will keep company with Japan’s Bashô, Russia’s Pushkin, Argentina’s Borges and Nigeria’s Achebe.

We shall not limit ourselves only to the western canon but will look at points of crisis where, whether because of gender, race, ideology or class, an individual’s voyage of discovery will demand answers and action. We shall trace a drama of self-actualization, more than two thousand years old, one that is still being enacted. From the extremities of the Greek stage to a lonely cry of agony in the Assyrian desert, from ideal Platonic love to its witty and non-dialectical Asian counterparts, from a Parisian’s insomnia in 1900 to the painful experience of post-colonial Africa, from compulsive gambling to uncanny hauntings, from the dark voyages of Romantic self-discovery to imagined journeys through magical lands, we shall explore the limits of this question’s answers.

While the basis of the course will be the literary texts, we shall pillage often and importantly the resources of the other arts of painting, sculpture and film especially to conjure back to life the spirits of these past identities in preparation for a spring in which we shall interrogate our own century as it emerges from the twilight of the twentieth-century experiment.

Texts: All selections will be from The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces (Expanded Edition in One Volume, 1997), and will include: Gilgamesh; Euripides, Medea; selections from Chuang Chou; Kalidasa, Sakuntala; selections from The Thousand and One Nights; Montaigne, “Of Cannibals;” Shakespeare, Hamlet; Basho, The Narrow Road to the Interior; Goethe, Faust; Baudelaire, from The Flowers of Evil; Pushkin, The Queen of Spades; Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths; Achebe, Things Fall Apart.

Requirements & Grading: The participation requirements include: Careful reading of all texts, consistent attendance and active discussion in class and in the discussion section. Attendance will be taken regularly at the start of each class. Each student will be allowed three unexcused absences in the course of the semester. Any further absences will lower the student's grade by a half grade (i.e. a B becomes a B-, and a B- becomes a C+).

What is a “self,” an individual? Is it a single entity or is it always entangled with others? Is it something created by history, by politics, by art, by culture, or by the divine? Or does it fashion itself? Does it change over time and across space? At some level, art is always concerned with making and unmaking the individual and with freeing or chaining this being. Tracking texts from Classical Greece, Palestine, and India to medieval Europe and the Middle East, we will focus on the continuing, and sometimes desperate, attempts of ancient and early modern artists and authors both to phrase and to answer this question. Expected names from the western canon, like Euripides, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire will keep company with Russia’s Pushkin, Argentina’s Borges, and Nigeria’s Achebe.

We shall not limit ourselves only to the western canon but will look at points of crisis where, whether because of gender, race, ideology or class, an individual’s voyage of discovery will demand answers and action. We shall trace a drama of self-actualization, more than two thousand years old, one that is still being enacted. From the extremities of the Greek stage to a lonely cry of agony in the Assyrian desert, from ideal Platonic love to its witty and non-dialectical Asian counterparts, from Parisian decadence to the painful experience of post-colonial Africa, from compulsive gambling to uncanny hauntings, from the dark voyages of Romantic self-discovery to imagined journeys through magical lands, we shall explore the limits of this question’s answers.

While the basis of the course will be the literary texts, we shall pillage often and importantly the resources of the other arts of painting, music, and film especially to conjure back to life the spirits of these past identities in preparation for a course in which we shall interrogate our own century as it emerges from the twilight of the twentieth-century experiment.

Texts: All readings will be posted on the course website, as will the multimedia supporting materials. Texts will include: Gilgamesh; Euripides, Medea; selections from Chuang Chou; Kalidasa, Sakuntala; selections from The Thousand and One Nights; Dante, from Inferno; Montaigne's "Of Cannibals;" Shakespeare, Hamlet; Baudelaire, from The Flowers of Evil; Pushkin, The Queen of Spades; Woolf, An Unwritten Novel; Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths; Achebe, Things Fall Apart.

Requirements & Grading: The participation requirements include: Careful reading of all texts, consistent attendance and active discussion in class and in the discussion section. Attendance will be taken regularly at the start of each class. Each student will be allowed three unexcused absences total (including both lecture and section) in the course of the semester. Any further absences will lower the student's grade by a half grade (i.e. a B becomes a B-, and a B- becomes a C+).

Two midterm examinations (35% and 40% each); Reading journal to be turned in periodically (15%); Attendance and class discussion (10%).

In order to pass the course all three assignments must be completed. Failure to complete any one of the assignments will constitute failing the course.

Description: Global Literature and Culture -- What is a “self,” an individual? Is it a single entity or is it always entangled with others? Is it something created by history, by politics, by art, by culture or by the divine? Or does it fashion itself? Does it change over time and across space? At some level, art is always concerned with making and unmaking the individual and with freeing or chaining this being. Tracking texts from Classical Greece, Palestine and India to medieval Europe and Japan, we will focus on the continuing, and sometimes desperate, attempts of ancient and early modern artists and authors both to phrase and to answer this question. Expected names from the western canon, like Euripedes, Shakespeare, Goethe and Baudelaire will keep company with Japan’s Bashô, Russia’s Pushkin, Argentina’s Borges and Nigeria’s Achebe.

We shall not limit ourselves only to the western canon but will look at points of crisis where, whether because of gender, race, ideology or class, an individual’s voyage of discovery will demand answers and action. We shall trace a drama of self-actualization, more than two thousand years old, one that is still being enacted. From the extremities of the Greek stage to a lonely cry of agony in the Assyrian desert, from ideal Platonic love to its witty and non-dialectical Asian counterparts, from a Parisian’s insomnia in 1900 to the painful experience of post-colonial Africa, from compulsive gambling to uncanny hauntings, from the dark voyages of Romantic self-discovery to imagined journeys through magical lands, we shall explore the limits of this question’s answers.

While the basis of the course will be the literary texts, we shall pillage often and importantly the resources of the other arts of painting, sculpture and film especially to conjure back to life the spirits of these past identities in preparation for a spring in which we shall interrogate our own century as it emerges from the twilight of the twentieth-century experiment.

Texts: All selections will be from The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces (Expanded Edition in One Volume, 1997), and will include: Gilgamesh; Euripedes, Medea; selections from Chuang Chou; Kalidasa, Sakuntala; selections from The Thousand and One Nights; Montaigne's "Of Cannibals;" Shakespeare, Hamlet; Basho, The Narrow Road to the Interior; Goethe, Faust; Baudelaire, from The Flowers of Evil; Pushkin, The Queen of Spades; Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths; Achebe, Things Fall Apart.

Requirements & Grading: The participation requirements include: Careful reading of all texts, consistent attendance and active discussion in class and in the discussion section. Attendance will be taken regularly at the start of each class. Each student will be allowed three unexcused absences in the course of the semester. Any further absences will lower the student's grade by a half grade (i.e. a B becomes a B-, and a B- becomes a C+).

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: “There are two impulses in theatre: to be frivolous or to make rules.” -- Tadashi Suzuki

Despite our current tendency towards virtual modes of communication and entertainment, theatrical practices thrive as theatres around the world engage our moment and connect with each other. The aim of this course will be two-fold: to give an overview of the rich textuality and performance potential of contemporary drama, especially in Europe, and to situate its production within the context of the politics and aesthetics of the last half century. The course tracks innovations in dramatic practice globally since the 1950s. We will focus on European avant-garde theatre, particularly on (post)-colonialism, the end of the Cold War, and U.S. multiculturalism. Our playbill will include texts from Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. Additionally the syllabus will include complementary plays from the United States, India, Africa, and Latin America, which address the issues raised by the European plays.

The course will focus on the works of playwrights who dare to make theatre after the end of the Second World War, the end of the European empires, the Vietnam War, and the great changes in culture and ideology of the last thirty years. Each of the major playwrights we will read inherits a challenge from the great British dramatic tradition and from the impact of the European avant-garde, whose imperatives each of them either continues or disrupts. We will begin in the 1950s pairing John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger with Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Beckett and Pinter’s later works deconstruct the modern subject while questioning a confident European political or artistic order. The remainder of the class will examine the development of, and resistance to, a radically left-wing and anti-realist/anti-naturalist theatre in Britain, the United States, and in post-colonial environments.

Texts: Primary dramatic texts will include: Reza’s Art, Stoppard’s Rock and Roll, Hwang’s M. Butterfly, Fugard’s Bloodknot, Valdez’s Zoot Suit, Kushner’s Angels in America, Mamet’s Oleanna, Devlin’s After Easter, and Smith’s Fires in the Mirror. Additionally we will read secondary materials on historical context and on shifts in dramatic styles from practitioners and critics. These will be supplemented by performance-related materials drawn from music, the visual arts, acting theory, and history. Filmed versions of the plays will be used where possible.

Requirements & Grading: The grade for the course will be based upon several written assignments, as well as a 15-minute oral report, together with one or two other members of the class (10%). All written assignments may be rewritten any time prior to the due date of the next written assignment. Grades for the rewrites will be averaged with the grade assigned to the original draft submitted. The written requirements for the class, for which detailed instructions will be provided later, include the following: a book of “Director’s Notes” (one 100-word entry for each reading assignment). The entries will be collected in two halves. (5% + 5%), a short assignment which considers a single play (5 pages, 20%), a brief research report and commentary (2 pages, 5%), a formal prospectus (100 words, 5%), a longer research essay (10 pages, 35%), a third assignment (3 pages, 15%).

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: Art in the theater is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light.

(Jerzy Grotowski, “Statement of Principles,” Towards a Poor Theater)

Drama is necessarily public and commercial, paid for and solicited by bourgeois patrons and therefore interacts dynamically with culture and society. The aim of this course will be two-fold: to give an acceptable overview of the rich textuality and performance potential of modern European Drama and to situate its production within the context of the politics and aesthetics of world literature more generally.

The course will focus on the work of six playwrights: Ibsen, Chekhov, Wilde, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, and Pinter. Each of these major playwrights will be paired with other playwrights whose work either continues or disrupts his imperatives. We will begin by looking at the great theatrical explosion of the turn of the century in Ibsen and Chekhov, who will be read, along with Wilde and Shaw, in the context of fin-de-siècle aesthetics and politics. We will then trace the development in the 1920s and 1930s of absurdist theatre in the plays of Pirandello, who will be paired with Ionesco, and of “epic” and political theatre in Brecht, who will be read together with Italian Futurism. A selection from Beckett’s plays will be read in the contexts of the two World Wars and the deconstruction of a confident European political or artistic order. The canon will be completed with Ionesco’s and Pinter’s plays and a selection of recent radical political plays, including those of Genet, Soyinka, Puig, Petrushevskaya, and Fugard, that reflects the creation and dissolution of the European empires in Latin America and Africa especially.

Much of the excitement of looking at theatrical texts derives from their multi-mediality, and we shall pillage the UT and on-line resources for performance material and footage. No previous familiarity with drama is expected or even solicited, and I will provide those introductions to theatre and performance theory that I think might be provocative.

Requirements & Grading: 1. Attendance of all class meetings and a 15-minutews oral report. (10%); 2. A book of “Director’s Notes” collected in two halves. (5% + 5%); 3. A short assignment which considers a single play (5 pages). (20%); 4.A research report and commentary (2 pages). (5%); 5. A formal prospectus (100 words). (5%); 6. A longer research essay, on a topic of the student’s choice. (10 pages) (35%); 7. A third assignment (3 pages) (15%).

Prerequisites: Completion of at least thirty semester hours of coursework, including E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A, and a passing score on the reading section of the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) test.

Description: Global Literature and Culture --

What is a “self,” an individual? Is it a single entity or is it always entangled with others? Is it something created by history, by politics, by art, by culture, or by the divine? Or does it fashion itself? Does it change over time and across space? At some level, art is always concerned with making and unmaking the individual and with freeing or chaining this being. Tracking texts from Classical Greece, Palestine, and India to medieval Europe and the Middle East, we will focus on the continuing, and sometimes desperate, attempts of ancient and early modern artists and authors both to phrase and to answer this question. Expected names from the western canon, like Euripedes, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire will keep company with Russia’s Pushkin, Argentina’s Borges, and Nigeria’s Achebe.

We shall not limit ourselves only to the western canon but will look at points of crisis where, whether because of gender, race, ideology or class, an individual’s voyage of discovery will demand answers and action. We shall trace a drama of self-actualization, more than two thousand years old, one that is still being enacted. From the extremities of the Greek stage to a lonely cry of agony in the Assyrian desert, from ideal Platonic love to its witty and non-dialectical Asian counterparts, from Parisian decadence to the painful experience of post-colonial Africa, from compulsive gambling to uncanny hauntings, from the dark voyages of Romantic self-discovery to imagined journeys through magical lands, we shall explore the limits of this question’s answers.

While the basis of the course will be the literary texts, we shall pillage often and importantly the resources of the other arts of painting, music, and film especially to conjure back to life the spirits of these past identities in preparation for a course in which we shall interrogate our own century as it emerges from the twilight of the twentieth-century experiment.

Texts: All readings will be posted on the course website, as will the multimedia supporting materials. Texts will include: Gilgamesh; Euripedes, Medea; selections from Chuang Chou; Kalidasa, Sakuntala; selections from The Thousand and One Nights; Dante, from Inferno; Montaigne's "Of Cannibals;" Shakespeare, Hamlet; Baudelaire, from The Flowers of Evil; Pushkin, The Queen of Spades; Woolf, An Unwritten Novel; Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths; Achebe, Things Fall Apart.

Requirements & Grading: The participation requirements include: Careful reading of all texts, consistent attendance and active discussion in class and in the discussion section. Attendance will be taken regularly at the start of each class. Each student will be allowed three unexcused absences total (including both lecture and section) in the course of the semester. Any further absences will lower the student's grade by a half grade (i.e. a B becomes a B-, and a B- becomes a C+).

Two midterm examinations (35% and 40% each); Reading journal to be turned in periodically (15%); Attendance and class discussion (10%).

In order to pass the course all three assignments must be completed. Failure to complete any one of the assignments will constitute failing the course.

35095-35140 •
Spring 2012
Meets
TTH 200pm-330pm JES A121A

Prerequisites: Completion of at least thirty semester hours of coursework, including E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A, and a passing score on the reading section of the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) test.

Course Description: Global Literature and Culture -- What is a “self,” an individual? Is it a single entity or is it always entangled with others? Is it something created by history, by politics, by art, by culture or by the divine? Or does it fashion itself? Does it change over time and across space? At some level, art is always concerned with making and unmaking the individual and with freeing or chaining this being. Tracking texts from Classical Greece, Palestine and India to medieval Europe and Japan, we will focus on the continuing, and sometimes desperate, attempts of ancient and early modern artists and authors both to phrase and to answer this question. Expected names from the western canon, like Euripedes, Shakespeare, Goethe and Baudelaire will keep company with Japan’s Bashô, Russia’s Pushkin, Argentina’s Borges and Nigeria’s Achebe.

We shall not limit ourselves only to the western canon but will look at points of crisis where, whether because of gender, race, ideology or class, an individual’s voyage of discovery will demand answers and action. We shall trace a drama of self-actualization, more than two thousand years old, one that is still being enacted. From the extremities of the Greek stage to a lonely cry of agony in the Assyrian desert, from ideal Platonic love to its witty and non-dialectical Asian counterparts, from a Parisian’s insomnia in 1900 to the painful experience of post-colonial Africa, from compulsive gambling to uncanny hauntings, from the dark voyages of Romantic self-discovery to imagined journeys through magical lands, we shall explore the limits of this question’s answers.

While the basis of the course will be the literary texts, we shall pillage often and importantly the resources of the other arts of painting, sculpture and film especially to conjure back to life the spirits of these past identities in preparation for a spring in which we shall interrogate our own century as it emerges from the twilight of the twentieth-century experiment.

Texts: All selections will be from The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces (Expanded Edition in One Volume, 1997), and will include: Gilgamesh; Euripedes, Medea; selections from Chuang Chou; Kalidasa, Sakuntala; selections from The Thousand and One Nights; Montaigne's "Of Cannibals;" Shakespeare, Hamlet; Basho, The Narrow Road to the Interior; Goethe, Faust; Baudelaire, from The Flowers of Evil; Pushkin, The Queen of Spades; Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths; Achebe, Things Fall Apart.

Requirements & Grading: The participation requirements include: Careful reading of all texts, consistent attendance and active discussion in class and in the discussion section. Attendance will be taken regularly at the start of each class. Each student will be allowed three unexcused absences in the course of the semester. Any further absences will lower the student's grade by a half grade (i.e. a B becomes a B-, and a B- becomes a C+).

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: Art in the theater is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light.

(Jerzy Grotowski, “Statement of Principles,” Towards a Poor Theater)

Drama is necessarily public and commercial, paid for and solicited by bourgeois patrons and therefore interacts dynamically with culture and society. The aim of this course will be two-fold: to give an acceptable overview of the rich textuality and performance potential of modern European Drama and to situate its production within the context of the politics and aesthetics of world literature more generally.

The course will focus on the work of six playwrights: Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, and Pinter. Each of these major playwrights will be paired with other playwrights whose work either continues or disrupts his imperatives. We will begin by looking at the great theatrical explosion of the turn of the century in Ibsen and Chekhov, who will be read, along with Wilde and Shaw, in the context of fin-de-siècle aesthetics and politics. We will then trace the development in the 1920s and 1930s of absurdist theatre in the plays of Pirandello, who will be paired with Ionesco, and of “epic” and political theatre in Brecht, who will be read together with Bulgakov. A selection from Beckett’s plays will be read in the contexts of the two World Wars and the deconstruction of a confident European political or artistic order. The canon will be completed with Ionesco’s and Pinter’s plays, Artaud and a selection of recent radical political plays, including those of Genet, Soyinka, Petrushevskaya, and Fugard, that reflects the creation and dissolution of the European empires in Latin America and Africa especially.

Much of the excitement of looking at theatrical texts derives from their multi-mediality, and we shall pillage the UT and on-line resources for performance material and footage. No previous familiarity with drama is expected or even solicited, and I will provide those introductions to theatre and performance theory that I think might be provocative.

Requirements & Grading: 1. Attendance of all class meetings and a 15-minutews oral report. (10%); 2. A book of “Director’s Notes” collected in two halves. (5% + 5%); 3. A short assignment which considers a single play (5 pages). (20%); 4.A research report and commentary (2 pages). (5%); 5. A formal prospectus (100 words). (5%); 6. A longer research essay, on a topic of the student’s choice. (10 pages) (35%); 7. A third assignment (3 pages) (15%).

E 350R •
Vampires And Dandies-Honors

35360 •
Fall 2011
Meets
TTH 1230pm-200pm PAR 210

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: A Gothic Perspective on the Long Nineteenth Century --

This course proposes to track two archetypes which have travelled through literature and culture together: the vampire and the dandy. The period considered by this course, 1789-1922, sees the dandy/vampire’s apogee as the sensationalist vehicle for both the most subversive and the most conservative tracts on European identity and culture from the height of Romanticism to the First World War. We shall begin with Beau Brummel’s creation of the dandy, the elegant man about town, and with recollections of the Grand Tour, which took British travelers to the realm of the vampire. The course will contextualize these new identities in regard to Central and Eastern European folk origins, European analogs and the imperial culture of Great Britain. The pairing combines ideally the century’s two most provocative iconographies of difference, whether that difference is cultural, ethnic or sexual: the Gothic and the Orientalist. From his/her origins as the predator who attacks the next-of-kin, the vampire joins with the dandy’s new image of gender and sexuality. Together they emerge as an “Other” who combines multiple fantasies of threat and seduction: that of a New-Woman feminine evil, that of Jewish or Slavic contamination, that of Orientalist, diasporic xenophobia, that of localized homophobia, that of cultural degeneration and decadence.

The vampire draws on Western Europe’s own atavistic past and links it to the Eastern Others who increasingly form and transform the British Empire and Europe as a whole. The dandy embodies the decadent modern self whose existence is as unnatural as that of the undead. The vampire is both the Turk and the Baron; she is both the transgressing Jew and the independent daughter, and “they” now inhabit the increasingly uneasy European capital cities. The dandy strolls these same boulevards, impersonating a modernity that is at odds with imperialist ideals of healthy citizenship. Are vampires and dandies a masquerade for demonizing marginal identities or can they seductively infiltrate society undetected as more than a strange visitor?

The century’s preoccupations with immigration, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class will be mapped against this reliably flamboyant combined figure. The methodology will combine cultural history, drawing upon the work of critics like Dijkstra, Auerbach, Williams, West, Hobsbawm and Foucault, with a special focus on identity politics as suggested by Phelan, Bulter, Gilman and others.

The spine of the course will be a genealogy of texts from Coleridge’s Christabel (1798) to the first filmic presentations of this figure. Its central piece will be a close cultural, historical reading of Stoker’s Dracula. It will include materials drawn from relevant genres, including painting and film. The British texts, including Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Salomé, will be viewed in juxtaposition with continental ones whose material conditions nuance their presentation of the icon of the dandy/vampire in different ways. Thus Byron/ Polidori’s The Vampire will be juxtaposed with Gogol’s Viy, and Stoker’s text with Parisian novellas by Rachilde and Huysmans. The suggestion is that the vampire/dandy combination become a distinctly contested site of cultural self-definition throughout nineteenth-century Europe.

Requirements & Grading: Written requirements for the course will include: a short initial essay based on a prompt from the instructor (20%), a research/bibliography report (5%), a long research paper on a topic chosen by the student (including a formal prospectus, 5% + 35%), a reading journal (collected in two halves, 5%+5%) and a final short writing assignment (15%). Additionally, each student will receive a grade for oral participation. The oral participation will include preparing, together with a colleague, an oral presentation for the class for which instructions will be provided (10%).

E 392M •
Staging The Long 19th Century

Staging the Long Nineteenth Century: From the Terror to the Trenches

Eric Hobsbawm invites us to the see the 19th century as bracketed not be the years 1800 and 1900, but rather by the French Revolution and the outbreak of the First World War. This bold framing invites us to consider the spectacles of the period, both political/military and artistic. The visual arts, painting and theatre in particular form one of the most dynamic and provocative introductions to the period and continue to inform our views on how to perform history today. The course will track European theatrical responses to the political events that begin with 1789 and the development of Romantic drama in France, Russia, Germany and Britain through to the last expressions of the 19th century in the moments before Sarajevo. There will be a focus on the roles of politics and history in shaping the content of the plays and on the dramatic philosophical and aesthetics innovations especially the Kantkrise, the development of Naturalism and Realism in the 1870s, and the turn towards Aestheticism and Symbolism in the 1880s and 1890s. The course will begin with the encounter with the Shakespearean legacy as a shared literary patrimony that forms/frames the development of Romantic drama. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic, wars, we will turn to a consideration of historical works such as Goethe’s Faust Part 1, Schiller’s Maria Stuart, Kleist’s Penthesilea, and Büchner’s Danton’s Death. The German texts precede the critique of texts such as Byron’s Manfred, Shelley’s The Cenci, Hugo’s Hernani, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov, and Lermontov’s Masquerade. Our view of the later 19th century will grounded in operatic innovations by Weber, Wagner, Mussorgsky and Berg in particular, whose works will be paired with melodramas by Boucicault (The Octoroon), Pinero (The Second Mrs. Tanqueray) and Lewis (The Bells). The course will conclude with a focus on taking stock of the century as the First World War approaches and anticipating Modernism in Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, Shaw’s Heartbreak House, and Chekhov’s The Seagull. Each text will be paired with appropriate period theoretical readings. Particular focus will be placed on the rise of imperialism and to period debates about gender, race, sexuality and the nature of the human in a dynamic, fraught and expanding global consciousness. Painting and music will also be included as part of the full consideration of the plays’ performative actualities. The course should be of interest to students of the long 19th c., European drama, and philosophical approaches to literature/aesthetic theory in particular.

Students will be expected to prepare a 15-minute oral report on materials related to the course and to their individual research projects. They will also be expected to write a research paper or to propose an appropriate alternative assignment. All texts, with the exception of the Shakespearean ones for which any edition may be used, will be provided in a reader and/or posted on Blackboard in English. Original languages versions of the texts will be available upon request. The operatic, musical, and fine arts materials will all be made available through Blackboard as well.

E F316K •
Masterworks Of Lit: World

83545 •
Summer 2011
Meets
MTWTHF 1000am-1130am WEL 3.502

Prerequisites: Completion of at least thirty semester hours of coursework, including E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A, and a passing score on the reading section of the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA) test.

Description: Global Literature and Culture --

What is a “self,” an individual? Is it a single entity or is it always entangled with others? Is it something created by history, by politics, by art, by culture, or by the divine? Or does it fashion itself? Does it change over time and across space? At some level, art is always concerned with making and unmaking the individual and with freeing or chaining this being. Tracking texts from Classical Greece, Palestine, and India to medieval Europe and the Middle East, we will focus on the continuing, and sometimes desperate, attempts of ancient and early modern artists and authors both to phrase and to answer this question. Expected names from the western canon, like Euripedes, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire will keep company with Russia’s Pushkin, Argentina’s Borges, and Nigeria’s Achebe.

We shall not limit ourselves only to the western canon but will look at points of crisis where, whether because of gender, race, ideology or class, an individual’s voyage of discovery will demand answers and action. We shall trace a drama of self-actualization, more than two thousand years old, one that is still being enacted. From the extremities of the Greek stage to a lonely cry of agony in the Assyrian desert, from ideal Platonic love to its witty and non-dialectical Asian counterparts, from Parisian decadence to the painful experience of post-colonial Africa, from compulsive gambling to uncanny hauntings, from the dark voyages of Romantic self-discovery to imagined journeys through magical lands, we shall explore the limits of this question’s answers.

While the basis of the course will be the literary texts, we shall pillage often and importantly the resources of the other arts of painting, music, and film especially to conjure back to life the spirits of these past identities in preparation for a course in which we shall interrogate our own century as it emerges from the twilight of the twentieth-century experiment.

Texts: All readings will be posted on the course website, as will the multimedia supporting materials. Texts will include: Gilgamesh; Euripedes, Medea; selections from Chuang Chou; Kalidasa, Sakuntala; selections from The Thousand and One Nights; Dante, from Inferno; Montaigne's "Of Cannibals;" Shakespeare, Hamlet; Baudelaire, from The Flowers of Evil; Pushkin, The Queen of Spades; Woolf, An Unwritten Novel; Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths; Achebe, Things Fall Apart.

Requirements & Grading: The participation requirements include: Careful reading of all texts, consistent attendance and active discussion in class and in the discussion section. Attendance will be taken regularly at the start of each class. Each student will be allowed three unexcused absences total (including both lecture and section) in the course of the semester. Any further absences will lower the student's grade by a half grade (i.e. a B becomes a B-, and a B- becomes a C+).

Two midterm examinations (35% and 40% each); Reading journal to be turned in periodically (15%); Attendance and class discussion (10%).

In order to pass the course all three assignments must be completed. Failure to complete any one of the assignments will constitute failing the course.

E 379R •
London In 1910: A Global Persp

35855 •
Spring 2011
Meets
TTH 1230pm-200pm GAR 1.134

Prerequisites: Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing.

Description: In many ways London was the center of the world in 1910, not only the center of the British Empire. It was the crossroads for commerce, power and the arts. It inspired and nurtured a new type of art that invited the audience to reevaluate and redefine their world. This course will consider the city of London at the beginning of a new century and on the eve of the First World War, placing its literary self-expression exactly one hundred years ago into a multimedia and international context. Innovations and extraordinary productivity in one field of the arts do not occur in isolation from other arts, or from politics and society. This course will explore the challenge that the dawn of a new century offered to its artists and thinkers and focus on how the city in which one lives changes and informs how one copes with the present, imagines the future and remembers the past. London will be situated both within the context of the British Empire and of three other great global cities with which it has the close contacts: Vienna, Paris and Moscow. In each city art and culture intersected and transformed each other, and all three helped to define Modern London and a new era. We shall aim to provide a portrait of this great city and the worlds it touched.

The core of the course will be literary, inviting students to read English works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker, as well as continental works by Anton Chekhov and Mikhail Bulgakov, Stéphan Mallarmé and Marcel Proust, Robert Musil and Rainer Maria Rilke. These fictional texts will be complemented by the writings of Walter Pater and Karl Marx, of Charles Darwin and Oswald Spengler. In short, since the problem of articulating a new aesthetics was addressed on many fronts, we shall consider a variety of selections. London's writers and artists, many of whom were impelled by a sense of political necessity and artistic radicalism, consistently saw the arts as connected to each other and to the larger world. Our focus will be distributed between painting/sculpture, literature, film, and theoretical discussions of the visual arts by contemporary critics and artists. This artistic flourishing will be contextualized in terms of urban development, new ideas about gender and sexuality, the expansion of empires and Orientalism, the balance of powers in Europe, and emergent knowledge systems like psychoanalysis, Symbolism, materialism, decadence, etc. We shall draw upon the resources of the Ransom Center and the Blanton which are exceptionally rich for turn-of-the-century London.

We shall view the London of Sherlock Holmes and Oscar Wilde through the lens of Proust’s and Rédon's Paris, Klimt's and Freud's Vienna, Chekhov’s and Stravinsky’s Moscow. And we shall visit many other artists and thinkers who sat in the same cafés. Our hypothesis will be that where you are says a great deal about who and what inspires you and whom and what you inspire.

Requirements & Grading: Oral report, attendance, participation: 10%

Written requirements, for which detailed instructions will be provided later: 90%

E 369 •
Twentieth-Century Drama

Drama is necessarily public and commercial, paid for and solicited by bourgeois patrons and therefore interacts dynamically with culture and society. The aim of this course will be two-fold: to give an acceptable overview of the rich textuality and performance potential of modern European Drama and to situate its production within the context of the politics and aesthetics of world literature more generally.

The course will focus on the work of six playwrights: Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, and Pinter. Each of these major playwrights will be paired with another playwright whose work either continues or disrupts his imperatives. We will begin by looking at the great theatrical explosion of the turn of the century in Ibsen and Chekhov, who will be read, along with Wilde and Shaw, in the context of fin-de-siêcle aesthetics and politics. We will then trace the development in the 1920s and 1930s of absurdist theatre in the plays of Pirandello, who will be paired with Ionesco, and of "epic" and political theatre in Brecht, who will be read together with Bulgakov. A selection of Beckett's plays will be read in the contexts of the two World Wars and the deconstruction of a confident European political or artistic order. The canon will be completed with Beckett's and Pinter's plays and at a selection of recent radical political plays, including Genet, Soyinka, and Fugard, that reflect the creation and dissolution of the European empires in India and Africa especially.

Texts

See Above

Requirements and Grading

Attendance of all class meetings and a brief oral report 15%

Two short essays (5 pages each) 25%+25%

One eight-page essay 35%

Prerequisite

Nine semester hours of coursework in English or rhetoric and writing. No exceptions.

Twentieth Century DramaSpring 2010

Art in the theater is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light. (Jerzy Grotowski, “Statement of Principles,” Towards a Poor Theater)

Intent of the Course:

Drama is necessarily public and commercial, paid for and solicited by bourgeois patrons and therefore interacts dynamically with culture and society. The aim of this course will be two-fold: to give an acceptable overview of the rich textuality and performance potential of modern European Drama and to situate its production within the context of the politics and aesthetics of world literature more generally.

The course will focus on the work of six playwrights: Ibsen, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht, Beckett, and Pinter. Each of these major playwrights will be paired with other playwrights whose work either continues or disrupts his imperatives. We will begin by looking at the great theatrical explosion of the turn of the century in Ibsen and Chekhov, who will be read, along with Wilde and Shaw, in the context of fin-de-siècle aesthetics and politics. We will then trace the development in the 1920s and 1930s of absurdist theatre in the plays of Pirandello, who will be paired with Ionesco, and of “epic” and political theatre in Brecht, who will be read together with Bulgakov. A selection of Beckett’s plays will be read in the contexts of the two World Wars and the deconstruction of a confident European political or artistic order. The canon will be completed with Ionesco’s and Pinter’s plays, Artaud and a selection of recent radical political plays, including those of Genet, Soyinka, Petrushevskaya, and Fugard, that reflects the creation and dissolution of the European empires in Latin America and Africa especially.

Much of the excitement of looking at theatrical texts derives from their multi-mediality, and we shall pillage the UT and on-line resources for performance material and footage. No previous familiarity with drama is expected or even solicited, and I will provide those introductions to theatre and performance theory that I think might be provocative.

Texts

The following texts are required for the course:

Reader, available from Speedway, Dobie Mall, Lower Level (478-3334)

Walter Levy, ed., Modern Drama: 1879-Present, available at the Coop

Most musical pieces, paintings and films are all available online or from local movie rental stores. In addition:

Most films are “On Reserve” in the Audio-Visual Library (FAC 340, 495-4467).

Most music is “On Reserve” at the Fine Arts Library (FAB 3.200, 495-4480).

Policy Statement

1. The oral, attendance, and participation requirements for the class include the following:

§ Attendance of the class meetings is required, and participation and questions are encouraged. Active class participation may assist in improving the student’s final grade in borderline cases. Students who do not participate in class discussions should expect to receive as their grade for the course as a whole the grade that they have earned for the written work. Attendance will be taken regularly at the start of each class. Each student will be allowed three unexcused absences in the course of the semester. Any further absences will lower the student’s grade by a half grade (i.e. a B becomes a B-, and a B- becomes a C+). Tardiness counts as absence. Any special circumstances or additional absences must be discussed with the instructor and approved in advance of the days to be missed.

§ Students are expected to come to class prepared. Careful reading of all assigned texts and viewing of all films are required for the day on which they are assigned. The written texts, films, and multi-media-materials together form the content of the course. Students are expected to have done the required work and to come to class with comments and questions about the material.

§ Students are expected to behave in a collegial and polite manner during class. Texting, answering email, talking outside the class discussion, or in any way being disruptive of the sessions or disrespectful to other students is not permitted. Students who do not pay attention in class will be asked to leave class and will be counted absent for the day.

§ Each student will give a 15-minute oral report, together with one or two other members of the class. At least 24 hours in advance of each report, the presenters for that day will post three questions for the class on Blackboard and will prepare a handout and/or .ppt presentation for the class. (10%).

2. The written requirements for the class, for which detailed instructions will be provided later, include the following (All assignments may be rewritten any time prior to the due date of the next written assignment. Grades for the rewrites will be averaged with the grade assigned to the original draft submitted.):

§ A book of “Director’s Notes” (one 100-word entry for each reading assignment). These notes will be completed while doing the assigned readings and should not be based on class discussion. Their goal is two-fold: 1) to demonstrate that the student has done the reading carefully and on time; 2) to share individual responses to the texts in a less formal environment. The entries will be collected in two halves. Due on 4 March and 4 May (5% + 5%)

§ A short assignment which considers a single play (5 pages). For the first short essay a topic will be suggested, although any topic that has been approved by the instructor in advance of submission will be encouraged and accepted. Due on 16 February. (20%)

§A research report and commentary (2 pages), on Internet and library resources for a topic of the student’s choice in preparation for the writing of the research paper. Due on 2 March.(5%).

§ A formal prospectus (100 words), which describes the area of focus and initial ideas for the research paper. This prospectus must be submitted to the instructor for approval. Due on 13 April. (5%)

§ A longer research essay (10 pages), on a topic of the student’s choice. Due on 22 April. (35%)

§ A third assignment (3 pages), which may involve creative writing, performance or a collaboration between students, or may be a short essay. Due on 6 May, (15%)

All work is expected to be the student’s own and is governed by UT’s policy on academic honesty:

The final grade for the course will be cumulative and based upon the percentages indicated. There will be no final examination. In order to pass the course all four assignments must be completed. Failure to complete any one of the assignments will constitute failing the course. All special circumstances must be discussed with the instructor in advance of the due date.

Any assignments submitted late will be held to a higher standard, because the student has had the unfair advantage of more time to prepare, and will be marked more severely as a result. The written assignments will be graded for form and style as well as content. No assignments will be accepted after 5 PM on Friday the 7th of May.

Students with Disabilities

The U. S. Federal Government defines someone with disabilities as “any person who (i) has a physical or mental impairment which substantially limits one or more major life activities [and] (ii) has a record of such impairment. University regulations stipulate that students with disabilities may seek “reasonable accommodations,” but they “must first register with Services for Students with Disabilities [,] provide appropriate documentation regarding [their] disability, [and] meet instructor expectations concerning attendance, class participation, performance and work standards.”

Readings

All selections will be from The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces (Expanded Edition in One Volume, Maynard Mack, Ed., 1997, ISBN 0-393-97143-0). This volume is available at the University Co-op.

Policy Statement and Requirements

Attendance and Class Preparation/Participation (10%):

In accordance with the change in UT undergraduate grading policies, students in the course will be graded on a 4-point scale which includes + and -.

A

4 grade points

A-

3.67 grade points

B+

3.33 grade points

B

3 grade points

B-

2.67 grade points

C+

2.33 grade points

C

2 grade points

C-

1.67 grade points

D+

1.33 grade points

D

1 grade point

D-

0.67 grade points

F

0 grade points

The final grade for this course includes a grade for attendance. Attendance of the lectures and the discussion sections is required, and participation and questions are encouraged. Attendance will be taken regularly at the start of each lecture and discussion section by the TAs for the students in their sections. It is the obligation of the student to make sure that his or her presence is recorded. Each student will be allowed three unexcused absences in the course of the semester. A student with three of fewer absences will receive the grade for the course earned by the written assignments. Any further absences will lower the student’s grade for the course by a half grade (i.e. a B becomes a B-, and a B- becomes a C+). All non-emergency requests, beyond the three allowed absences, must submitted to the instructor for approval at least 48 hours in advance of the days to be missed. Students should think carefully before “using up” the absences early in the semester.

Students are expected to come to the lectures prepared and to bring their books with them. Careful reading of all assigned texts is required for the day on which they are assigned. Students should skim the introductory notes to each section as well as read the primary texts carefully. Further multi-media resources will be presented in class and made available on-line. The written texts, films, and extra multi-media-materials together form the content of the course for which students will be held accountable on the examinations. Reading questions are posted on the course webpage to assist students with their reading their studying for the examinations.

Attendance and active participation in the weekly one-hour discussion sections is required. Attendance will be taken regularly at the start of each section meeting. Students are expected to have done the required reading and to come with comments and questions about the texts and lectures. All teaching assistants will provide their students with a policy statement about their sections and will hold regularly scheduled weekly office hours.

Students are expected to behave in a collegial and polite manner during lectures and in the discussion sections. Texting, answering email, talking with other students, and in any way being disruptive of the sessions are not permitted. Students who do not pay in attention in class will be asked to leave class and will be counted absent for the day.

Consistent attendance and a record of active participation in the discussion sections may assist in improving the student’s final grade in borderline cases.

Written Assignments (25%+25%+25%+15%):

The written assignments will include three midterm examinations. Two one-hour examinations will be administered during regular class periods. The third midterm will be given on the date scheduled for the final examination for the course. The time allowed for the last examination will be one and a half hours and the questions will cover the last third of the course in more detail and may refer to material from earlier in the course. Any arrangements to take the examination at a time other than the one scheduled are subject to approval and must be made to the instructor in writing at least48 hours prior to the original time for which the examination is scheduled.

Each student will maintain a daily reading journal to be turned in periodically in the discussion session. The journal may be collected at any of the lectures or discussion sections without advance notice, so students should bring it with them. The grade assigned will be based on the work completed at the time of the journal being collected. Instructions for completing the journals are on the course webpage.

In order to pass the course, all four assignments must be completed.

Failure to complete any one of the assignments will constitute failing the course.

All work submitted for the course must be the student’s own. Any work which is academically dishonest and has been plagiarized from other sources including the internet will receive a failing grade and may result in failing the course and further disciplinary actions as outlined by the Office of the Dean of Students at:

Students with Disabilities

Students with disabilities may request appropriate academic accommodations from the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, Services for Students with Disabilities, 471-6259. The U. S. Federal Government defines someone with disabilities as “any person who (i) has a physical or mental impairment which substantially limits one or more major life activities [and] (ii) has a record of such impairment. University regulations stipulate that students with disabilities may seek “reasonable accommodations,” but they “must first register with Services for Students with Disabilities [,] provide appropriate documentation regarding [their] disability, [and] meet instructor expectations concerning attendance, class participation, performance and work standards.”